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Happy New Year! The first Shore Poets event 2019 season is almost upon us and we’d love you to join us! Please come along and help us celebrate our first selection of poets for this year. We’re delighted to welcome back honorary Shore Poet and much-loved Edinburgh poet Diana Hendry. She’ll be reading alongside her partner; the poet, publisher and current Shore Poet, Hamish Whyte. If you haven’t heard them read together before, you’re in for a treat. They’ll be joined by Rex Sweeny who is this month’s new poet and our musicians – the talented trio, Tribaiser.

Diana has published six collections of poems, including Making Blue, Borderers and Late Love & Other Whodunnits (all Peterloo Poets) and The Seed-Box Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Mariscat). Her most recent collection is The Watching Stair (Worple Press, 2018). In 2015 she collaborated with Douglas Dunn and Vicki Feaver in Second Wind (Saltire Society/Scottish Poetry Library): poems on ageing.

She has also written over 40 children’s books, including the Whitbread-winning Harvey Angell and recently The Seeing which was shortlisted both for the Costa Prize and Scottish Book of the Year. A junior novel, Out of the Clouds, came out from Hodder in 2016, with a sequel, Whoever You Are,in 2018. Her short stories have been widely published and broadcast.

She was the first writer in residence at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary and from 2008 to 2010 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She has recently co-edited New Writing Scotland.

Janice Galloway has commented: ‘Diana Hendry’s poetry has a wonderful sense of the author’s voice, dark and bitterly sweet at the same time, like high-grade chocolate.’

Hamish has had three collections of poems published by Shoestring Press, A Bird in the Hand, The Unswung Axe and Things We Never Knew (the last published 2016). A pamphlet Now the Robin came out from HappenStance Press in 2018.

He has also edited many anthologies of Scottish literature, including Mungo’s Tongues: Glasgow Poems 163-1990, An Arran Anthology, Kin: Scottish Family Poems, Scottish Cats (Birlinn 2013) and most recently Ten Poems About Robins (Candlestick Press, 2018).

He runs Mariscat Press, publishing the poetry of Edwin Morgan, Stewart Conn, Douglas Dunn, Jackie Kay, Gael Turnbull, Christine De Luca, Diana Hendry and Jim Carruth among others. In 2015 Mariscat won both the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award and the Michael Marks Award for poetry pamphlet publishing. He is an Honorary Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, a member of Edinburgh’s Shore Poets and plays percussion with the band The Whole Shebang.

His long poem Window on the Garden was reviewed in Scotland on Sunday as ‘impossible to describe, like Joni Mitchell and James Joyce deciding to rewrite Thomson’s The Seasons in the style of Sappho.’

Originally from Sussex, Rex Sweeny spent twelve years in Oxford before moving to Scotland and has lived in Edinburgh since 1989. He organises and hosts the annual CultFusion poetry event for Leith Festival and his work has appeared in The One O’Clock Gun, Torn Pages and the 2013 anthology New T@les From The Old Town.

MUSICIANS: TRIBAISER

A group of three Heriot-Watt musicians, and more so very good friends, comprising of Fraser Sharp, Kyle Kinnear and Jack Lodge playing drums, jazz keys and trombone respectively. The trio is set to enjoy its second consecutive year playing at the event following a year of musical road trips and music courses around the West and North coasts of Scotland!

AND THE LEMON CAKE RAFFLE

The lemon cake raffle provides us with much-needed funds, and of course provides one lucky winner with a very excellent lemon cake. Sometimes we have poetry pamphlets in the raffle too.

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Happy New Year, poetry fans! Shore Poets has been enjoying a restful Christmas break, and we hope you have, too. But now we’re back, with a truly fabulous line-up to kick off your literary year. Check it out!

The headline poet for this brand new New Year session is Kathleen Jamie. Kathleen was born in Renfrewshire, grew up in Currie and attended the University of Edinburgh, reading for a degree in Philosophy. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1981 aged just 19, and her first collection, Black Spiders, was published the following year.
Since then, she has published many other collections, including the well known and well loved The Queen of Sheba in 1994. Her most recent collection, The Overhaul, published in 2012, won the Costa Prize and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. She holds the Chair in Creative Writing at Stirling University. You can hear readings of her poems at poetryarchive.org, and read more about her work at spl.org.uk.

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Our Shore Poet this month is Jane McKie. Jane is the author of two poetry collections: Morocco Rococo (Cinnamon, 2007), and When the sun turns green (Polygon, 2009). The former won the Sundial Award for best first book of 2007, and in 2011, Jane won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize. Her most recent publication is Garden of Bedsteads, also 2011 (Mariscat Press). She teaches on the University of Edinburgh’s MSc Creative Writing programme, and is also a creative facilitator for the Making It Home project, based at Maryhill Integration Network in Glasgow.

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Michael Pedersen is our January New Poet. Michael is from Edinburgh and has published two poetry chapbooks: Part-Truths (Koo Press) and The Basic Algebra of Buttering Bread (Windfall Books). His first full collection, Play with Me, was published by Polygon in 2013 and blurbed by none other than Stephen Fry (yes, that Stephen Fry). Michael helps to run the monthly literary cabaret Neu! Reekie!, alongside Rebel Inc editor and veteran Scottish counter-culture poet Kevin Williamson. Michael is also a songwriter and has worked on various poetic and musical collaborations. Follow him on Twitter via @scribepedersen for more.

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There’ll be a chance for YOU to read your work as part of this stellar line up, too! Just bring a poem, put your name in the hat at the door when you arrive, and you may be picked for one of our TWO three-minute wildcard slots!

Our headline poet is Meg Bateman. Meg was born in 1959 in Edinburgh, studied Gaelic at the University of Aberdeen, and holds a PhD in Classical Gaelic religious poetry. Her first collection, Òrain Ghaoil / Amhráin Grá was published, with facing Irish translations by Alex Osborne, in 1990. In English, the title is “Love Songs.” Poems from Òrain Ghaoil were republished in Aotromachd agus Dàin Eile in 1997. Meg’s third collection, Soirbheas, was published in 2007. She lives in Skye with her son and teaches at the Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.

There will also be poetry from our New Poet Iain Matheson, and the Shore Poet this month is Martin McIntyre.

A reminder: although there was a brief hiatus for the open night, the Shore Poets wildcard slot has now returned. If you want to read one of your poems at our May event, then bring one along with you and put your name into the wildcard hat when you pay at the door. One name will be drawn and open the evening with a poem!

We’ll also have live music from the Guerrilla String Quartet, and of course, our famous lemon cake raffle.

It’s getting mighty cold outside these days, and it’s extremely tempting to stay wrapped up warm inside. But trust us, it’ll be worth venturing out on Sunday 25th November to see the fantastic trio of poets we’ve got lined up!

“Graham Fulton uses memory, observation, and invention to create a heady linguistic soup that uses poetry to make sense of the world; there’s compassion here, and anger, and a burning desire to illuminate places that don’t often get the poetic torch shone on them. Read and enjoy.”